Hey all!
Thank you again for your patience and your contribution.
Today is the day. We’re happy to share that our solution has just been released to all Jira and Confluence users!
You are now able to
- keep smart links as your default view, but add exceptions for the domains you want to insert as simple URLs instead (for example your dev/stage environments or third party tools you use that you’d rather see the URL for)
- turn smart links off by default, but add exceptions for the domains you want to keep them for (for example Jira, Confluence, Google Drive or Figma)
This is where your settings live → https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/link-preferences. You can also access the settings page by clicking your avatar at the top right of your product, clicking ‘Manage account’ and then heading to the ‘Link preferences’ tab. If you need more help, feel free to check out our step-by-step guide.
While we are confident that this will satisfy the needs of most users, we do acknowledge that there is a need for a site-wide, admin-controlled setting as well. For everyone interested in that feature, please follow this new ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-79892
And last but not least, to all our loyal Trello users: while we haven’t finished the required work just yet, these settings will also work for your connected Trello accounts soon.
Thank you again for participating.
Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform
Hey everyone!
Thank you all for your continuous feedback and your patience!
We’re happy to share that we’ve made great progress on the proposed solution and feel confident to share some details of the feature and when you can expect it to be released.
How will the feature work?
- Users will be able to set their preferred view for all links to either URL, Inline, Card or Embed Smart Link view, with Inline being the default setting
- Additionally users will be able to set their preferred views for specific domains/URLs
- Example 1: you could choose URL view for a specific domain you don’t want to insert as smart links, but keep smart links on for all other URLs
- Example 2: you could keep Smart Links for your Jira and Confluence links, default your Giphy and Youtube links to Embed, and default all other links to URL
- When you set preferred views for specific domains/URLs, we can’t guarantee that your preferred view is always possible. While the ‘URL’ view will always be possible for links that match your exception, ‘Inline, ‘Card’ and ‘Embed’ will depend on whether or not we currently support the preferred view for that domain.
- The feature will be found in a central place at https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/, affecting Smart Links in Jira, Confluence and Trello
- Example 1: Your preferences will work for the Jira Description field, Confluence Pages and Trello Description field, because they all uses Smart Links
- Example 2: Your preferences won’t work for the ‘Linked Issues’ feature on the Jira Issue View, because it’s not a Smart Link
When will the feature be released?
- You can expect this to be shipped to all users during the month of October
Want to contribute?
- We’ve already got a prototype that we’re testing with users. If you want to get an early look at what’s coming and have the chance to provide feedback directly, please book in with us via https://calendly.com/mbytnerowicz/smart-link-default-view
Have a good day everyone,
Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform
Atlassian update - 02 May 2022
Hey everyone!
Thank you all for your valuable feedback, and special thanks to those who have reached out directly and participated in user testing sessions with us.
I’m happy to announce that we going to provide you with the following solution:
- Every user will be able to set 'URL’ as their default insertion format instead of the smart link format
- Every user will be able to set this for either all non-Atlassian URLs, or only for specific domains, so that you have the option to continue using some smart links you find useful, but not others
- This setting will overwrite the default insertion format, but still allows you to upgrade your links to smart links after you've inserted them
- This setting will be effective across all Atlassian products you are authenticated with (e.g. Jira, Confluence, Trello).
What are we not doing?
- Admins will not yet be able to perform this setting for all their users. That’s because we want to respect the preference of each content creator. There's a related ticket on this request that you can follow and vote for.
- Smart Links can’t be turned off from a reader's perspective - if the creator of a link inserted a link as a smart link, you will see it as a smart link. That’s because we want to respect content the way it was intended by the author.
Some of you have raised concerns about the security and privacy of our smart links. When conducting our user research we found that in many cases that’s because users believe that when they connect their 3rd party account (e.g. Google Drive) it will also connect it for other users. It is important to understand that when you connect to a 3rd party app and authenticate with it, that connection exists for only you. So, if you authenticate with your 3rd party account (e.g. Google Drive) and insert a link, other users will not automatically be able see that link's information, unless they have also authenticated with the service themselves and have got the permissions required to see it.
We hope that the proposed solution will make working with smart links easier for you, and we are looking forward to receiving your feedback.
Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform
Atlassian update - 06 April 2022
Hi everyone!
We've been listening to your feedback, concerns and ideas to improve our Smart Link solution and realised that especially in recent months more and more users were unhappy with the feature. We appreciate all your feedback, and special thanks to those who have used the opportunity to book in with me, to help us understand the problems better so we can find the best solution.
I'm happy to announce that we have prioritzed this issue and are going to work on a solution soon. You can expect an update with details about the solution by the end of April.
Thank you again for your active contribution to help us make our products better!
Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform
Hi all!
We are currently looking into different solutions that can address the problems you are experiencing working with Smart Links.
There are different reasons to why the current experience is not ideal for some of your use cases, and we want to make sure we are addressing the most pressing problems first. Some solutions require more time than others, and we want to make sure we can improve the experience incrementally while exploring further possibilities.
I'm happy to announce that you will soon have the option to bypass the Smart Link experience using Cmd+Shift+V when inserting links. We are in the process of implementation and I will update you all once it's available to you.
From the feedback we've received, we know that this will be helpful for many of you, although not the ideal solution for everyone - please know we will continue to explore further. We've received a lot of feedback on the experience of typing text that automatically turns into Smart Links (e.g. when typing file names, domain names or formats) - we will be exploring solutions for these use cases next.
If you want to take a bigger role in helping us build better products, or just want some face-to-face time to express your ideas, please feel free to book in some time with me via https://calendly.com/andremauritz/smart-links-feedback.
Thank you again for all your feedback.
Andre | Product Manager, Linking Platform
Problem:
A recent update to cloud-hosted Jira now automatically attempts to resolve URL links and when successful it will replace the actual text of the URL with an clickable text link of the website's title and favicon.
Clicking on this "enhanced" link offers a new menu with 3 display options:
- Display URL (the previous default behavior)
- Display Inline (the new default behavior)
- Display Card
This is problematic for those of us that always need to display the actual URL. While each instance can be resolved with two clicks, this can add significant work when multiple URLs are involved.
Suggestion:
Give users the ability to set a preference for the default behavior of this functionality.
Steps to Replicate:
This functionality appears both in the editor for issues and the editor for comments on issues.
- Type in a URL such as https://www.w3.org . (Note the URL must be accessible to Jira - a public website.)
- The URL will be automatically replaced by the favicon and website title.
To get the previous behavior (to show the actual URL), you must take the following extra steps:
- Right click on the website title and a dropdown will appear.
- From the dropdown which has "Display Inline" currently selected, choose "Display URL".
Thank you for your consideration.
- is related to
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JRACLOUD-72429 Option to Disable Smart Links For Non-Atlassian Products in ADF editor
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[JSWCLOUD-21494] Create user preference for default behavior of URL "display inline" function
This is a great feature but it would be great if the inline link option could have a secondary inline option where it display the ticket number and the status but not the subject line contents which can sometimes create formatting issues on pages as the field can be quite big when used in a review table or page properties report.
This is great news! Thanks for adding preferences so we can determine how links should appear.
I can confirm this feature will never be launched; Atlassian are keen to track all of the URLs that are being shared... This data is probably being sold on as there will be many internal URLs that will contain sensitive information that would be of value to them.... Originally I managed to block the URL parsing but it seems that the Atlassian team created new APIs to circumvent the blocking in the last 2 weeks or so..
The latest URLs that need to be blocked are:-
/gateway/api/object-resolver/check
/gateway/api/gasv3/api/v1/batch
/gateway/api/directory/graphql
/gateway/api/object-resolver/resolve/batch
/rest/analytics/1.0/publish/bulk
@andre, can you please make it so that the account admin can set a default, and/or disable the feature entirely for their domain?
This is a security issue.
Thank you,
Alex
An always-looking-around-for-the-best-option user
Do my eyes deceive me? Did this feature get launched? It appears the create issue and edit issue screens are by default (for everyone in our organization) maintaining the "display URL" version and only offering to convert the link if the user specifically attempts to modify it. Can this be true?
> Smart Links can’t be turned off from a reader's perspective - if the creator of a link inserted a link as a smart link, you will see it as a smart link. That’s because we want to respect content the way it was intended by the author
This makes the feature entirely useless. This isn't a "content creation" platform. Users aren't writing a book here. They're making issues, in which they're pasting URLs the rendering of which is then being messed up by the software.
When one is a developer or system engineer one has ZERO need for cutesy buttons with titles. We want the true data. What the "content creator" intended is not what we want to see.
its been well over a year, when is issue going to be addressed????????
I'm unhappy to see that this change request (requested by many users) is a minor feat for a developer, obviously a major challenge for the responsible product manager.
I'm happy to see this issue is being worked on. Hope to see a resolution soon.
IMO, the "feature" just became worse. Now when I try to restore the URL, I see icons that I don't understand (and not words).
Now I have to think about the icons, which violates one basic principle of UIs (which is also the title of the Steve Krug book)
"Don't make me think"
Atlassian, why are you making us think more about this?!
Why does Jira interpret hyperlinks in such a terrible way? Why can't I simply paste a hyperlink into a Jira ticket??? Instead, I have to go through a horrible process of clicking a whole bunch of buttons just to get a URL to display. This is a dumb problem Atlassian has created. Real shame it's taking a really long time to fix.
There's nothing I hate more than editors/IDE's changing the text I've input and (importantly) causing content layout shift mid-input, resulting in misclicks or just simply confusing me as I type/paste or forcing me to wait so I can CTRL-Z to undo the change that occurred. At least in some situations it's configurable, but ideally a sane default would be to not do this and allow users who do want this the ability to enable it (instead).
We need a setting for the admins to NOT let the user choose one or the other, so that we can enforce the normal behavior, aka NO manipulation of the text we put in the text.
Thanks Andre for the nice explanation. Now please stop analyzing and start working on the feature.
I can see that this top priority for Atlassian and as such may I propose a more aggressive time-line of 2050 launch....
No it doesn't say October 2022, it only says October.
So I guess it meant to October 2042, but the year 2038 bug made the calendar crash, so they left the year out completely.
Tbh October 2021 would have been too late.
Another solution that I use is to do CTRL+Z as soon it auto masks the wed address into a related web name and icon.
Agreed. Not sure our company would approve of adding an extension just to work around a feature/bug in Jira.
While it's nice to have a workaround, I'm not going to suggest that 400+ people at my company should do it - it's wasting everyone's time, and I'm not sure our security policy would allow that extension.
This software-flatulence of a feature needs to go. There needs to be an organization-wide setting to disable it.
@Jason Cheng
Thank you SO much. This has solved a year of pain, rewriting what I wrote in the first place because it keeps getting auto-changed!!!
@Jason Cheng, thank you for the URL. Blocked Sites did not work for me as it wanted only the main domain and not a full URL (at least what I could figure out.) I did add the URL to my already-installed uBlock Origin and that worked for me. Thanks again.
I just found a solution if you are using Chrome:-
(1) Download the extension called HTTP Request Blocker:-
(2) Customise and add this URL to the Blocked Sites:-
https://<<namespace>>.atlassian.net/gateway/api/object-resolver/check
Replace <<namespace>> with your namespace e.g. https://abcshop.atlassian.net/gateway/api/object-resolver/check
And then after that the URLs stop getting parsed.
Added after, there is another URL that seems to parse internal URLs that you might want to block too:-
https://<<namespace>>.atlassian.net/gateway/api/gasv3/api/v1/batch
(e.g. https://abcshop.atlassian.net/gateway/api/gasv3/api/v1/batch)
@Andre Mauritz: Thanks for the update on the coming solution! ("02 May 2022", buried in the flurry of comments for me)
Is there an estimate for when Atlassian may be able to roll this out? I'm glad to see a solution is coming, but unfortunately this update is missing any indication of when we might expect to see it. Thanks!
It's downright sadistic and cruel for how long this "feature" has been left active after so much backlash.
I needed to paste 100 URLs the other day, and I had to manually 1 by 1 change the "stupid links" back to URLs, because we always need the URL and never the "stupid link". After the 50th link I swore to never use an Atlassian product again.
I'm moving all my repositories out of Bitbucket and over to Github. I'm looking for a new project management tool to replace Jira. This is all because of "smart links" and Atlassian's indifference and glacial pace in responding to their client's painfully obvious needs.
@Andre Mauritz - what's the hold up? It's BEEN OVER A YEAR since this ticket was created. Please give us a timeframe for when this will be resolved.
Look folks, the pain we feel from this is likely intentional, and malicious. If anyone at Atlassian actually reads this thread..... they are laughing at us.
Why is such a simple task so complicated and taking so long to implement? Just disable this stupid feature.... Nobody wants URLs parsed....
I don't want it..... By default the parsing should be off!!
The strategy should be:-
- Stop all parsing immediately for all organisations and all accounts
- If you really want parsing of URLs; set up a setting to allow users to switch it on
Do we have a planned date when we'll be able to default to URLs? Next month? 2023? 2024?
Where is the progress on the fix for this??
Can you imagine how frustrating it was when I pasted in 100 URLs and they all automagically changed to those stupid "smart" links? I had to change 100 URLs back to the real URLs manually, one by one - because the full URL was VERY IMPORTANT to us. It's extremely aggravating, and I can no longer recommend Jira as a solution for any company as long as this insanity persists.
We need an organization-wide setting to turn smart links off. We cannot have any of our users accidentally have their correspondence obstructed like this. A simple thing as trying to specify lists of SMTP and DNS endpoints fail miserably. The entire smart links feature and implementation should actually be considered a bug and be removed and/or an opt-in.
Please also respect that especially in the developer community not every dns name is a URL. If I type 'mailserver.example.com' I do NOT expect it to be converted into a url.
I understand that you "want to respect the preference of each content creator", but please allow Admins to set the default for those who don't have a preference. If the default is "display inline" — and from this issue's history, I'm guessing that it will — and Admins are not able to change this default, this will be much less useful that it should.
Please, please please make "Display URL" the default for each user, or give admins the ability to set this to the default. we are considering using Confluence for engineering documentation and this alone is making us look elsewhere.
Imagine a team where all of our documentation uses regular links, and "smart" links start appearing. now I have to add a separate step in my onboarding docs for each new engineer to go and change this user setting. as smart links start appearing in our docs, I now have to go and track down who has forgotten to set this setting, or else manually clean up after them whenever I see smart links appear.
I get that you do not want to kill the smart links feature entirely, but please, make it possible for ADMINS to disable. tell me you will do that, and we'll start using Confluence.
> Admins will not yet be able to perform this setting for all their users. That’s because we want to respect the preference of each content creator. There's a related ticket on this request that you can follow and vote for.
@Andre Mauritz, that issue (JRACLOUD-74441) has specifically to do with connected accounts. where is the bug report tracking "Admins will not yet be able to perform this setting for all their users", which your 02 May 2022 update says we can upvote ?
Please confirm: will the default for a new user be "Display URL"? Please do not let the default setting be "Display Inline".
The 6 april 2022 says that they will be releasing the "details of the solution" at the end of April.... and NOT releasing a solution... All they need to do is cancel URL parsing. That would be my definition of DONE.
My guess is people are coming here from other linked/cloned tickets and not reading the description on this ticket. It's very good to hear they are actively working on this. That said, the comment about "in recent months" is total bunk. There has active discussions and comments on this very issue for well over a year.
Really? Folks, read the top – they literally posted an update about a week ago. See "Atlassian update - 06 April 2022" at the very top of this ticket.
Actually, they are deliberately ignoring this thread because they want to monitor every link that is being posted..... It's part of a data harvesting initiative.
let's be honest here:
- Jira support is ignoring this issue
- Not seeing this issue
- Doesn't give a crap about our gripes with this issue
It's so annoying that whenever I type up a simple URL like https://www.oneday.com.vn/
I get
Instead of
Please can somebody at Atlassian wake up and sort this out!
Thank you!
Can someone at Atlassian please confirm if this change will also apply to Confluence as well, not just Jira?
Thank you! 
Edit (2022-06-16): Description appears to show this applies to Confluence as well.
One year and god knows how many comments of hate later and nothing seems to be changing.
I'm reminded of this horribly-considered feature at least 20 times a day.
Time is a value and cost. We have to change URL every time and wait for refreshing data. Time. If we change address to display URL and corect it we have to change again. Time.
"bypass the Smart Link experience using Cmd+Shift+V when inserting"
Default should be display URL, optional Smart Links. It is a progress but someone doesn't understand problem. Personally I had no reason to use Smart Links even once.
It's nice that a default display preference can be configured; but would have preferred that the existing behavior also be retained - i.e. allowing selection for how to display an individual link